AMD Steamroller on track for 2013 launch

AMD confirmed that the launch of its Steamroller architecture is on track for 2013. The company did not reveal which Steamroller based processors it will launch this year, but it implied the next-generation of Opteron server chips will be Steamroller-based.

he Sunnyvale, California-based company published a slide called “AMD Opteron Technology: Delivering multiple generations of greater functionality and improved performance” in its Q1 2013 investor presentation, which clearly puts release of Steamroller in 2013. In the previous version of AMD enterprise roadmap, the company clearly stated that its Opteron “Abu Dbabi” powered by Piledriver high-performance x86 cores will be its focus for 2013 and 2014. The next-generation of Opteron processors was planned to be introduced for the second half of 2014 reports xbitlabs:

As it appears, AMD has either dramatically changed its Opteron plans and the new chip will actually be launched this year (which either suggests compatibility with current sockets or means that AMD intends to unveil a new platform for server microprocessors with support for PCI Express 3.0 and improved functionality), or just wants to show that it is on-track with the micro-architecture, which will power different chips.

Earlier this year AMD updated its roadmap for client-class personal computers. It reiterated plans to launch its code-named Kabini and it is a new-generation accelerated processing unit with Steamroller x86 general-purpose core as well as Radeon graphics engine based on GCN architecture.

AMD Steamroller: ExpectationsAMD revealed a lot of details about the Steamroller at Hot Chips conference in August, 2012. Just like in case of the Bulldozer architecture, Steamroller x86 cores - which will power AMD's future high-performance Opteron and FX chips - will be located inside dual-core modules and therefore processors on its base should be similar by design with Orochi and Viperfish, with some minor exceptions that will not be truly important (new memory controller, different internal buses additional tweaks, etc) foe x86 performance. The main improvements will be independent instruction decoders for each core within a module, better schedulers, larger and smarter caches, more register resources and some other enhancements.

One of the reasons why dual-core Bulldozer modules [the same may be said about Piledriver] are not completely efficient is because they have only one instruction decoder for two ALUs and one FPU. With steamroller, AMD not only incorporated two decoders per module, but also increased instruction cache size (to lower i-cache misses by 30%), enhanced instruction pre-fetch (the number of mis-predicted branches is down by 20% compared to Bulldozer ) as well as improved max-width dispatches per thread by 25%. AMD believes that Steamroller will provide 30% improvement in ops per cycle.

AMD also advanced single-core execution by implementing 5%-10% more efficient scheduling, incorporated higher-capacity register files and performed some other tweaks. It should be noted that while integer pipes of Steamroller will not be too different from existing ones, the floating point pipe will be a bit redesigned. In general, AMD promises that both integer and floating point per-core performance of Steamroller will be higher than they are today with Bulldozer micro-architecture.

One of the interesting features of AMD Steamroller will be its ability to disable unused parts of L2 cache. Since not all apps are cache-bound, this may result in decreased power consumption and/or AMD's ability to boost clock-speeds of its microprocessors dynamically.

It is noteworthy that AMD decided to talk about its Steamroller micro-architecture that will be utilized inside microprocessors made using 28nm process technology approximately a year or more ahead of their roll-out

#4567664 Posted on: 04/01/2013 07:26 PM
AMD's only problem in their Bulldozer designs have been single threaded performance the entire time. Once they solve it, the FX would be a true competitor to Intel's offerings, assuming Intel doesn't figure out a new way to leap frog AMD's performance.

The FX's multithreaded performance is known to be very good, so all there is left is the single threaded performance.

They also need a new chipset to support PCIe 3.0, I know we don't need PCIe 3.0 but there's a lot of marketing value to it because most mainstream people only look at the name of the technology, if it looks new, they'll buy it. Maybe the new chipset could support a newer HyperTransport speed too.

deltatux

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#4567701 Posted on: 04/01/2013 08:03 PM

AMD's only problem in their Bulldozer designs have been single threaded performance the entire time. Once they solve it, the FX would be a true competitor

Waaaaaay too optimistic. That's the same thing as saying once they stop being bad they'll no longer be bad. To "fix" their criminally stupid single threaded performance they'd have to make a new architecture. There is no real solution using the nutjob architecture they chose in favour of advancing K10. Just imagine if they had stuck with K10, Intel would have actually had some competition right now.

With Bullpile they'll never catch up to Intel. I'd bet Steamroller won't even catch up to Ivy Bridge, and Haswell will already be out. It'd be optimistic to imagine they'll catch up to Sandy Bridge.

Edit: Oh and "Q1 2013" my foot. That would mean they would have to release it this month at latest.

IPlayNaked
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#4567718 Posted on: 04/01/2013 08:27 PM
Waaaaaay too optimistic. That's the same thing as saying once they stop being bad they'll no longer be bad. To "fix" their criminally stupid single threaded performance they'd have to make a new architecture. There is no real solution using the nutjob architecture they chose in favour of advancing K10. Just imagine if they had stuck with K10, Intel would have actually had some competition right now.

With Bullpile they'll never catch up to Intel. I'd bet Steamroller won't even catch up to Ivy Bridge, and Haswell will already be out. It'd be optimistic to imagine they'll catch up to Sandy Bridge.

Edit: Oh and "Q1 2013" my foot. That would mean they would have to release it this month at latest.

Hey we got a CPU engineer here! Just how much does Bulldozer/piledrivers relatively poor branch prediction affect the single threaded performance, and what would you do to remedy that?

It didn't say anything about a Q1 release. It said that this was mentioned in a Q1 investors' meeting.

Taint3dBulge
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#4567721 Posted on: 04/01/2013 08:36 PM
Waaaaaay too optimistic. That's the same thing as saying once they stop being bad they'll no longer be bad. To "fix" their criminally stupid single threaded performance they'd have to make a new architecture. There is no real solution using the nutjob architecture they chose in favour of advancing K10. Just imagine if they had stuck with K10, Intel would have actually had some competition right now.

With Bullpile they'll never catch up to Intel. I'd bet Steamroller won't even catch up to Ivy Bridge, and Haswell will already be out. It'd be optimistic to imagine they'll catch up to Sandy Bridge.

Edit: Oh and "Q1 2013" my foot. That would mean they would have to release it this month at latest.

Come on now, you know that the piledrivers are hand n hand with almost all aps and games compaired to the i5 and just a bit behind on the i7 but selling for the price of a i3..

I know you want to think that intel is beyond better but truth to the matter is right now the chips arnt that far apart.. right?

deltatux
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#4567741 Posted on: 04/01/2013 09:06 PM
Waaaaaay too optimistic. That's the same thing as saying once they stop being bad they'll no longer be bad. To "fix" their criminally stupid single threaded performance they'd have to make a new architecture. There is no real solution using the nutjob architecture they chose in favour of advancing K10. Just imagine if they had stuck with K10, Intel would have actually had some competition right now.

With Bullpile they'll never catch up to Intel. I'd bet Steamroller won't even catch up to Ivy Bridge, and Haswell will already be out. It'd be optimistic to imagine they'll catch up to Sandy Bridge.

Edit: Oh and "Q1 2013" my foot. That would mean they would have to release it this month at latest.

Ivy Bridge isn't THAT much better than the FX series, only single threaded performance is lacking in FX CPUs at the moment, and in gaming, they're pretty much in the same ball park, except for in dual threaded games like Starcraft II or older games. With multithreading, depending on the application, the FX beats out the Core i5 which is in the same price range.

Once AMD keeps on tweaking their architecture, they're gonna have a good competitor. Remember, AMD isn't going after the performance crown and for the price that they are selling it for, it has great potential to beat out the Intel equivalent for the same price in future revisions.

By making the instruction decoder separate for each core inside each module, instructions would be decoded faster since the same instruction decoder don't need to feed two cores. I'm quite optimistic with Steamroller. If AMD can really hit the 30% performance increase, then AMD can catch up, but that's all on paper until we test them.

Honestly, if Bulldozer was what Piledriver is now, I wouldn't have bothered with switching over to Intel.

I know plenty of you guys think that power consumption is overrated, but that alone is what gets you in or out of the laptops, you know... that thing that gets you lots of money

DSparil
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#4567765 Posted on: 04/01/2013 09:41 PM
I really look forward to Steamrollers desktop release! If they deliver on the promised performance benefit, it would be a great leap from Bulldozer. Probably wouldn't be worth it to go from Piledriver to Steamroller though.

Waaaaaay too optimistic. That's the same thing as saying once they stop being bad they'll no longer be bad. To "fix" their criminally stupid single threaded performance they'd have to make a new architecture. There is no real solution using the nutjob architecture they chose in favour of advancing K10. Just imagine if they had stuck with K10, Intel would have actually had some competition right now.

With Bullpile they'll never catch up to Intel. I'd bet Steamroller won't even catch up to Ivy Bridge, and Haswell will already be out. It'd be optimistic to imagine they'll catch up to Sandy Bridge.

Edit: Oh and "Q1 2013" my foot. That would mean they would have to release it this month at latest.

Way too optimistic? Not at all and I completely agree with Deltatux. Where AMD has been hurting is single threaded performance, and once they shore up those issues, AMD will be golden. You don't think Steamroller will "catch up" to Ivy Bridge? News flash, Piledriver has already done that! In fact, as Delta mentioned, Ivy Bridge i5's are already being beaten in many benches with Vishera chips that cost less $$. Haswell may be another story, but we'll see.

I know plenty of you guys think that power consumption is overrated, but that alone is what gets you in or out of the laptops, you know... that thing that gets you lots of money

Their APUs don't really consume too much power, their TDP is around 17-35W which is about the same as Intel's TDP (not including their U series Core i3s and i5s)...

Only on desktops do AMD CPUs take up more electricity but you won't really see the difference in the electricity bill, around a couple dollars difference per year.

deltatux

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#4567775 Posted on: 04/01/2013 09:49 PM

only single threaded performance is lacking in FX CPUs

Which is the most important and precisely what I'm talking about. It's so behind that even with twice as many "cores" at a significantly higher frequency it can't beat Intel's offerings.

It seems people want to plug their ears and not listen, pretty much everything is still single and dual threaded. Ever had an installation take a long time even on an SSD and wondered why it took so long? Single thread processing limit. People see 12% of the CPU being used and don't realize it's 1 thread maxed out and its time slices distributed among all 8 threads; it's still limited by the maximum of a single thread.

The only way they'll achieve a 30% increase in performance is with increased clock speeds as well. It will not be anywhere near 30% faster clock for clock. I would be surprised if it was even 15%. Steamroller will still have only one FPU per module, they're still half-assed cores. They will have subpar performance in most programs which are dual threaded, they will have abysmal performance in single threaded programs and AMD will cherry pick artificial benchmarks and anomalies to make it look like an adequate product for the price. AMD fans will vouch that these FX chips are excellent, it may server their purposes, but I prefer the highest single thread performance I can get.

In what? Some niche market that exists in someone's imagination? For my purposes, high performance per thread, and maximum performance in the $250-$400 range the only option has been Intel.

You make it sound like I'm happy with this monopoly, at the very least the next chip I get is going to cost me $350 before taxes just because there is no competition. When overclocking is taken into account the gap increased even further. Even if AMD did manage to offer something in that price/performance range that gave overall the same performance, that would still be with 8 threads, I'm bound by too many single threaded programs.